Service Brings Scorn to Israel’s Ultra-Orthodox Enlistees
By ISABEL KERSHNER, NYT
JERUSALEM — They have been labeled “Hardakim,” a derogatory term that combines Haredim, the name commonly used here to denote ultra-Orthodox Jews, with the Hebrew words for insects and germs.
As the Israeli government presses ahead with plans to enlist young Haredi men and phase out their wholesale exemption from the country’s mandatory military service, hard-line elements in the ultra-Orthodox community are fighting back by ostracizing the few thousand community members already in the armed forces.
Crude, comics-style posters have appeared in recent weeks on billboards across ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods nationwide portraying those soldiers, who volunteered under programs meant to attract Haredim, as fat, bearded, gun-toting caricatures in uniform snatching terrified Haredi children off the streets.
The strictest Haredim, who insist on the right of all ultra-Orthodox men to engage in full-time Torah study and worry about exposure to a more secular life, denounce the soldiers as “traitors” and liken them to a pestilence.
(More here.)
JERUSALEM — They have been labeled “Hardakim,” a derogatory term that combines Haredim, the name commonly used here to denote ultra-Orthodox Jews, with the Hebrew words for insects and germs.
As the Israeli government presses ahead with plans to enlist young Haredi men and phase out their wholesale exemption from the country’s mandatory military service, hard-line elements in the ultra-Orthodox community are fighting back by ostracizing the few thousand community members already in the armed forces.
Crude, comics-style posters have appeared in recent weeks on billboards across ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods nationwide portraying those soldiers, who volunteered under programs meant to attract Haredim, as fat, bearded, gun-toting caricatures in uniform snatching terrified Haredi children off the streets.
The strictest Haredim, who insist on the right of all ultra-Orthodox men to engage in full-time Torah study and worry about exposure to a more secular life, denounce the soldiers as “traitors” and liken them to a pestilence.
(More here.)
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